Fictions of Labor

by Richard Godden

Fictions of Labor considers William Faulkner's representation of the structural paradoxes of labor dependency in the southern economy from the antebellum period through the New Deal. Linking the occlusive stylistics of Faulkner's writings to a generative social trauma that constitutes its formal core, Richard Godden argues that this trauma is a labor trauma, centered on the debilitating discovery by the southern owning class of its own production by those it subordinates. By way of close textual analysis and careful historical contextualization, Fictions of Labor produces a persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner's work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labor relations in the American South.